Indian American sentenced to 12 years for killing newborn

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Indian American Nausheen Rahman, 30, of New Springville, was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Monday as she had admitted to killing her baby and placing the newborn in the trash.

At the hearing in Supreme Court, Justice Mario F. Mattei imposed three years of post-release supervision.

Rahman has already served two years of time and could be freed in little more than eight years.

According to SILive.com, Rahman made a long and tearful statement asking for leniency, but the judge imposed the negotiated plea for first-degree manslaughter for the death of the baby, a girl, in March 2016.

“Your actions were unthinkable, they were unforgivable, they were callous, and you took a harmless child and put it in a garbage bag as if it was a worthless peace of trash. Today and only today do you show an ounce of remorse, so your sentence is well deserved,” said Mattei, adding that Rahman “started a false narrative” in the immediate aftermath of the crime by not showing remorse and claiming to police that she didn’t realize that she was pregnant.

“You did everything you could to make the child you brought into this world as insignificant as possible. It’s no wonder the child was found in the fetal position, having been assaulted the instant it was born. In fact, you tried to terminate your pregnancy, so in my mind there’s no question that you intended to do what you did on the day the child was born. Your actions on that day showed that this wasn’t a situation where you panicked at the thought of what might happen to your life if this life was allowed to continue,” he added.

In her statement, Rahman told the court that she was sorry along with telling the police that the baby’s father was not willing to support the child and he was not the man she was to be married to, blaming her actions partly on her cultural and religious heritage.

“My actions were an offense against my character and personality as well as an offense against my family and community. Today, for my actions I take full responsibility. What many Americans may not know is that a Muslim woman in the Indian/Pakistani culture is oppressed in her own land,”  Rahman said in her statement.

“When I became pregnant, I was terrified of the response of my father and the cultural backlash that I knew I would experience, so I hid my pregnancy out of fear, fearing condemnation and estrangement from the family and an unspoken terror that would brand me as an evil and wicked person for the rest of my life. Don’t get me wrong, Islam is a beautiful faith tradition and I do honor my mother and father in accordance with the teaching of Islam. However, it is the cultural corruption that places young girls and women under very rigid and unforgiving circumstances,” she added.

SILive.com reported that police say they found the infant’s bloodied corpse in the fetal position, her thumb next to her mouth in a garbage can outside Rahman’s family home on Richmond Hill Road on the morning of March 12, 2016.

The medical examiner determined that the baby was alive when she was born and since Rahman admitted to disposing the newborn, the infant’s death is considered a homicide.

Rahman also told detectives that she had learned of her pregnancy only a few months before giving birth.